Today consumers purchase and use billions of discs each year. CD discs are a common medium of storage of music and DVDs are becoming, more and more, the common medium of storage of movies and other audio-visual works. In addition, various forms of optical memory discs have become a common storage medium for data, of all sorts, in today's world in which personal computers are so widely prevalent that they now appear in grade schools and talk of hundreds of millions of personal computers is commonplace. The common thread for each of these discs is that they have a disc hole in a disc center so that whatever device is using the disc can spin the disc and retrieve data from the spinning disc.
In the past, CD discs replaced other methods of storage as the most popular medium for music. However, despite the enormous popularity of musical CDs, the cases in which CDs were packaged were limited.
Because of a long felt need for improved CD cases, and especially for CD cases in which the disc can easily be ejected, numerous inventors, including the present inventor, endeavored to come up with improved CD cases that would meet the demands of consumers. See, e.g., U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,265,721 and 5,495,939. However, despite much effort, and despite many different inventions, the market still lacks an economical CD case from which a CD can be ejected. At least part of the explanation for the failure of the market to embrace such inventions has been manufacturability and cost.
As the need for an economical, ejectable CD case went unfulfilled, a new market for DVD discs roared into existence. DVDs have now become enormously popular as a storage medium for movies and sales of movies on DVDs has increased faster than even many within the industry predicted. The result is a vast consumer market for DVDs. Yet, despite the size of this market, DVD cases remain bulky and not always easy to use. Like CD cases, there is a crying need for improvement that has gone unfulfilled.
In addition, optical discs are now in common use as a storage medium in conjunction with computers. But, again, storage cases for such discs are still relatively primitive.
The present invention addresses the long felt need for an improved, economical, case for storing individual CD, DVD or other discs, and more particularly to a case in which the disc is ejectable from the case. Because no such case can be successful unless it is durable, manufacturable and capable of being used in conjunction with existing packaging operations for CD and DVD mass production, the present invention eschews complexity and boldly discloses a revolutionary new solution that can be assembled from three pieces produced by injection molding that can be snap fit together in conjunction with existing assembly techniques.